James Garfield Randall, biographer of Abraham Lincoln and historian of the Civil War, helped to establish these fields as major subjects of inquiry for professional historians. Before the appearance of his writings, books dealing with Lincoln and the Civil War largely were the province of amateurs--clergymen, military figures, politicians, and journalists. Professional historians, graduate-school-trained scholars who earned their livelihoods from studying history, tended to avoid examining the middle period. For them the decades surrounding the Civil War were too controversial, too laden with sectional polemics to satisfy the rigors of "scientific" historical scholarship. But Randall disagreed. Exhaustive research, he insisted, coupled with a dedication to objectivity, would allow the historian to untangle the myths and misunderstandings surrounding Lincoln and his age. Masterful analysis of the administrative and constitutional questions of the Civil War period became Randall's trademark and, ultimately, his foremost contribution to American historiography.

Randall was born...